MORTON FELDMAN (January 12, 1926
– September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York
City. A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer
of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental
New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian
Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational
innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound:
rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem
softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring
asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to
explore extremes of duration. Feldman was born in Brooklyn, New
York City into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Kiev.
His father was a manufacturer of children's coats. As a child he
studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, who, according to the composer
himself, instilled in him a "vibrant musicality rather than
musicianship." Feldman's first composition teachers were Wallingford
Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg,
and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who studied under
Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent most of
their time simply talking about music and art. In early 1950 Feldman
went to hear the New York Philharmonic give a performance of Anton
Webern's Symphony, op. 21. After this work, the orchestra was going
to perform a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feldman left immediately
before that, disturbed by the audience's disrespectful reaction
to Webern's work. In the lobby he met John Cage, who was at the
concert and had also decided to step out. The two composers quickly
became good friends, with Feldman moving into the apartment on the
second floor of the building Cage lived in. Through Cage, he met
sculptor Richard Lippold (who had a studio next door) and artists
Sonia Sekula, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, and composers such
as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil. With encouragement
from Cage, Feldman began to write pieces that had no relation to
compositional systems of the past, such as the constraints of traditional
harmony or the serial technique. He experimented with non-standard
systems of musical notation, often using grids in his scores, and
specifying how many notes should be played at a certain time, but
not which ones. Feldman's experiments with the use of chance in
his composition in turn inspired John Cage to write pieces like
the Music of Changes, where the notes to be played are determined
by consulting the I Ching. Through Cage, Feldman met many other
prominent figures in the New York arts scene, among them Jackson
Pollock, Philip Guston and Frank O'Hara. He found inspiration in
the paintings of the abstract expressionists, and throughout the
1970s wrote a number of pieces around twenty minutes in length,
including Rothko Chapel (1971, written for the building of the same
name, which houses paintings by Mark Rothko) and For Frank O'Hara
(1973). In 1977, he wrote the opera Neither with original text by
Samuel Beckett. Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for
Jack Garfein's 1961 film, Something Wild. However, after hearing
the music for the opening scene, in which a character (played by
Carroll Baker, incidentally also Garfein's wife) is raped, the director
promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland
instead. The reaction of the startled director was said to be, "My
wife is being raped and you write celesta music?" Morton Feldman's
music "changed radically" in 1970: moving away from his
interest in graphic notation and arhythmic notation systems and
toward a more rhythmically precise method of composition. The first
piece of this new period was a short, fifty-five measure work entitled
"Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety", dedicated to
his childhood piano teacher, Vera Maurina Press. In 1973, at the
age of 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor (a title of
his own devising) at the University at Buffalo. Prior to that time,
Feldman had earned his living as a full-time employee at the family
textile business in New York's garment district. In addition to
teaching at SUNY Buffalo, Feldman also held residences during the
mid-1980s at the University of California, San Diego. Later, he
began to produce his very long works, often in one continuous movement,
rarely shorter than half an hour in length and often much longer.
These works include Violin and String Quartet (1985, around 2 hours),
For Philip Guston (1984, around four hours) and, most extreme, the
String Quartet II (1983, which is over six hours long without a
break.) Typically, these pieces maintain a very slow developmental
pace (if not static) and tend to be made up of mostly very quiet
sounds. Feldman said himself that quiet sounds had begun to be the
only ones that interested him. In a 1982 lecture, Feldman noted:
"Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes
everything out? That just cleans everything away?" Feldman
married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death.
He died from pancreatic cancer in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New
York, after fighting for his life for three months.

A major figure in 20th-century music, Morton Feldman
was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with
the experimental New York School of composers also including John
Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman’s works are characterized
by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic
sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings
that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving
music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977,
also begin to explore extremes of duration. If any single piece
epitomizes the beauty and the hypnotic power of Morton Feldman’s
final works, it is Piano and String Quartet, composed
in 1985, just two years before his death. Performances generally
last between 80 and 90 minutes, relatively modest by the standards
of late Feldman, but the self-contained world this music creates
is utterly distinctive, and the way of listening to it unique –
“Up to an hour you think about form”, Feldman once wrote, “but after
an hour and a half it’s scale”. The tempo never changes, the
dynamic range is limited and the musical material scanty: rocking
chords that never quite repeat exactly, long held single notes and
an upward arpeggio that acts like a point of reference throughout.
The composer David Lang points up the relationship between Feldman’s
music and that of Webern: in Piano and String Quartet, Lang says,
“you can hear Webern in the distance – in the way each gesture,
each note, each phrase matters. It’s just that in Feldman’s music
there are so many, many more of them."